Opus 5 becomes Claude Max’s default model

Effort settings remain central to its cost and performance comparisons.

Capvise MediaEvent 24 Jul 2026Published 15 Oct 20261 min read

Photo: Context photograph of real server racks: RIT CSH - Server Rack (183838995). The facility is not identified as belonging to the company or product in this report. Credit: Jon Parise, “RIT CSH - Server Rack (183838995).jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Adapted by resizing and WebP re-encoding. · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Resized for web delivery

A new default for Max

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July, making it the default model on Claude Max and the strongest available option on Claude Pro at launch. The company kept pricing at the level of Opus 4.8, while describing stronger software engineering, computer use and knowledge work.

The announcement compares results at different effort levels, rather than presenting model quality as a single fixed score. More reasoning can change both success and cost, so a chart’s setting is part of the result. Anthropic said Opus 5 approached Fable 5 on several tasks at a lower price, while remaining behind Mythos 5 on cybersecurity. That is a differentiated model lineup, not evidence that the cheaper option replaced every capability of the restricted models.